Too Much Bandwidth?
ceg3:
I am a TWC customer and recently received a big upgrade in bandwidth and now I have about 235 Mbps down and 25 up. It almost seems I'm having poorer call quality since that upgrade, than before. Is this unheard of? I'm wondering if this might be the mysterious bufferbloat.
drgeoff:
Lots of 'bandwidth'* will never be the reason for poor quality, but if it comes with high jitter or high error rates those could be responsible.
(* bandwidth is an analogue measure but is very often incorrectly used in digital scenarios.)
RFC3261:
Quote from: ceg3 on November 15, 2015, 12:03:47 pm
I am a TWC customer and recently received a big upgrade in bandwidth and now I have about 235 Mbps down and 25 up. It almost seems I'm having poorer call quality since that upgrade, than before. Is this unheard of? I'm wondering if this might be the mysterious bufferbloat.
Bufferbloat can be a contributor, but typically when TWC increases the customers limits they are using the same equipment (both CMTS and residential router), so that it is not likely to be a new contributor.
Are you using (for example) a OBi2xx as a router? If so, you will need to change the way you are doing things (the OBi2xx uses 100Mb/sec ports, and as such your new connection exceeds its capacity).
SteveInWA:
Quote from: ceg3 on November 15, 2015, 12:03:47 pm
It almost seems...
Well, that's not very specific. The best way to actually measure any VoIP service quality issue caused by your broadband service would be to run the G.711 SIP VoIP test from Visualware. Run it several times from various endpoints, and look for variation in the MOS. A MOS less than 4.0 means you have a problem with your broadband service. This time of year, it's common in many parts of the country for coaxial cable distribution systems to get moisture incursion into the cables and connectors, causing signal issues. If you get a poor score, call TWC and complain. It doesn't matter how fast the raw speed is; what matters is the lack of signal degradation. The higher-speed service is enabled via channel-bonding, in which multiple cable channels (as would otherwise be used for TV) are multiplexed to provide a combined greater speed. If one or more channels are dropping out, the modem can usually manage it, but if the signal gets really degraded, it could cause a problem.
http://myspeed.visualware.com/index.php
Anticipating any objection about "I refuse to install Java", just install it long enough to run the test, then uninstall it.
As for "bufferbloat", that's DSLReports BS. The OBi devices have adaptive buffering that is robust enough to deal with it.
The 100mbps Ethernet connection on the OBi 202 devices would only be an issue for anything plugged into the OBi's LAN port. The OBi's internal LAN port, feeding the ATA, only needs enough speed to carry the VoIP traffic, which is insignificant, at <1Mbps per VoIP channel. So, it doesn't matter if it's being fed from a 3Mbps DSL service, or a 1Gbps fiber service, as long as it is of sufficient quality (MOS >=4).
restamp:
Quote from: ceg3 on November 15, 2015, 12:03:47 pm
I am a TWC customer and recently received a big upgrade in bandwidth and now I have about 235 Mbps down and 25 up. It almost seems I'm having poorer call quality since that upgrade, than before. Is this unheard of? I'm wondering if this might be the mysterious bufferbloat.
Several months ago my service provider, WOW cable, doubled everyone's speeds. However, it wasn't seamless: They had several switches that overloaded and started dropping packets as a result. I could tell because pings to my voip provider showed significant intermittent packet loss. Of course, calling WOW tech support was worthless; the only thing they would do is offer to send someone out to the house. The good news is that eventually, over the next month, the packet loss problem slowly resolved itself as the network guys tweaked or upgraded the overloaded hardware, although UDP reliability has never been as rock-solid as it was before the upgrade. So, give the TW engineers a chance to work their magic. I'd bet that in a month things will pretty much be back to normal.
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